How big is a house? Average house size by country

How big is your house? Is it big enough? Is there an optimum amount of floor space per person? This post takes a look at average house sizes around the world and asks how much space is enough.

Last month the New York Times published a piece about Graham Hill’s 420 square-foot (39 square-metre) apartment in which he argued that having less space and less stuff can create room in your life for more important things.

From a carbon emissions point of view you got the feeling that his travel habit probably negated much of the benefits of having less stuff (as pointed out by Christie Aschwanden). But that aside it raised an interesting question: how much space is enough space?

A smaller home requires less embodied energy to build, has lower heating and cooling needs, needs fewer furnishings, takes less time to maintain and requires less work to fund.

In terms of carbon emissions small is beautiful. But how small is too small? And how much space is enough?

Average house size by country

If you asked all the people of the world whether they would prefer a bigger or smaller house I’d guess almost everyone would plump for more space. That makes perfect sense for people living in small and overcrowded spaces, but is there a point at which we have enough space?

To get a little perspective I’ve put together a graphic to illustrate how big the average new home is around the world.

The figures are in square-meters of usable floor space, and include data for both houses and flats.

Click to the image to expand, or if you prefer square-feet click this link.

In the countries I could get data for the average new home varied in size from 45 m2 (484 ft2) in Hong Kong up to 214 m2 (2,303 ft2) in Australia.

US home size has fallen a little since the recession, to 201 m2 (2,164 ft2) in 2009. UK house size is relatively small at 76 m2 (818 ft2) while Canadian houses are quite big at 181 m2 (1,948 ft2). For China the data only reflects urban properties, which now average 60 m2 (646 ft2) and have almost doubled in size in the last 15 years.

There are all sorts of reasons for these differences. Wealth levels, urbanization rates, land access and climate all play a part. Nonetheless the scale of the differences is pretty fascinating.

The thing that is really missing from this picture is people.

Average floor space per person

We can take our analysis a little further by looking at how much floor space this equates to per person.

Using data on average household size we can estimate floor space per inhabitant for new homes. This analysis is a bit rough and ready, as it assumes new homes are being built for the average household. Nonetheless it is useful because it helps to control for the considerable differences in household size between countries.

Here are the figures in square-meters.

Click to the image to expand, or if you prefer square-feet click this link.

At just 15 m2 (161 ft2) a person in Hong Kong has just a quarter of the floor space of the average Australian or American.

If Graham Hill lives by himself then his trendy 39 m2 (420 ft2) is similar to someone from Sweden. In fact in the range from 30-45 m2 (323-484 ft2) are the averages for Italy, the UK, Japan, Spain, Sweden, France and Greece.

At our place we have 110 m2(1,184 ft2) for a family of four, which is 27 m2 (291 ft2) per person. Having previously lived in a few different flats of 50-60 m2 as a couple this feels pretty palatial, and is certainly more than enough for us. But 30 m2 per person is much more generous in a four person family than it is in a studio apartment for one.

In London they have a new minimum space standard as part of the London Plan. For new flats the minimum standards are 37 m2 (398 ft2)for one person, 50 m2 (538 ft2) for two people in one bedroom, 61 m2 (657 ft2) for three people with two bedrooms, 70 m2 (753 ft2) for four people in two bedrooms and 74 m2 (797 ft2) for four people in three bedrooms. Are these enough space?

In my mind if you have decent ceiling heights, good windows, clever storage and not too much stuff a little space can go a long way.

I don’t know how big my house is but it is a new 4 bed 2 bath 2 garage place and just myself and my young son live here (in Australia) and I have no idea how other families in the neighbourhood with 2 adult and 2+ kids would manage in a place this size although if I could live somewhere with no neighbours and only be able to live in a place the size of a bedroom or two, I would!!!

QuM3

My family of 4 lives in a home just over 6600 sq ft. This leaves about 1650 sq ft per person. Many people that enter my home are amazed first that the all the ceilings are 10 ft and the great room ceiling is 22ft. We never feel cramped and the house is not cluttered.

I believe there’s quite a revolution going on where people are actually looking to trend to smaller and smaller homes, hence the tiny house movement increasing in momentum. I guess cos many of us a choosing to have smaller families (fewer kids) and there also seems to be a growing trend to not collect as much ‘stuff’, the need for massive large scale homes is diminishing.

Pat Robins

St George built it. Not impressed. I live in a 60 metre sq 2003 new build flat in a new housing association flat (read higher rent and £7 per week service charges for a lift and a bucket and mop cleaner once a week on the landings, no longer is out internal waste chute cleaned once a month) in block for the social housing Imperial Wharf grudgingly built at the back, out the way, by the overground rail station, on the Fulham side of Chelsea Harbour, almost by the river, good enough for poor scum like me. We watch ‘them’ and their younf yell out of their Ferrari’s ‘pikies’ and other insults.

What C21st joy I have two windows, 2.5 feet wide by 3 feet tall triple glazed, one in the bedroom and one in the living space, open plan kitchen, fridge noise, washing machine, cooking smells et al.

I have no windows in the bathroom or kitchen, effectively no cooker hood extraction process that actually works. The supposed ventilation / trickle extract system is utterly crap. It does next to nothing but add to electricity bill. Short arsed architects, so short they thing a ceiling they can not touch is OK, short arsed architectss who no nothing about kitchens and actual cooking, designed this BS. I’d dearly love to cook fish in their living rooms, be it steamed, grilled or fried !!

There is utterly inadequate storage. No balcony. I’m 6 feet 1.5 inches tall but I can not stretch out my arms and hads above my head without breaking my fingers. It is awful as a space and yet I’m a lucky one as others have even smaller space. Rabbit hutches like this should not be permitted and so no the numbers quoted above are not by any menas enough. We need minimum standards and sizes for 6 footers like me not just you bloody midgets !!!

FloydPierce

Hi, your post did leave a strong impression on me. I like this. But by the way, can you help me know the ways to count 4 quarter squares? Thanks a lot!

emcon1

I grew up in South Africa, a family of 5 in a 228sqm home. That’s around 2400sqft giving 480sqft per person. My wife and I moved into our own place which was 140sqm (around 1550sqft) giving each of us 775sqft of space…
…and she still didn’t have enough space for all her clothes and shoes… =8O

Rakesh Kamal

Is there a international standard on how big a house is needed for decent living? Any leads will be greatly appreciated

http://www.inspiredhomeideas.com InspiredHomeIdeas

I can understand how everything is getting smaller as our need for ‘stuff’ reduces as we get older and with the baby boomer generation now approaching retirement, they dont need super large houses any longer

Mahender Goriganti

At 15m sq/person in HK, which is an advanced state, if shrunk down to 45m sq for 4 with three bedrooms is an ample space is equivalent of 430 sq foot. I Imagine if only Americans learn to live like that how much savings for them, in transportation, taxes, insurance, lawyer fees, heating & electric,mortgages, interest payments, more importantly how much less time to work to pay all these bills and more time to oneself to enjoy life ??
Apparently the average home in US now is 2,750sq feet, addiction for itch we sacrifice working like slaves to pay the bills. good ex: if say 500s1 ft home costs 100,000, when all costs, including taxes, mortgage(30y) etc, one ends up paying pays 750,000 in today’s money. if the 2750 sq ft home costs 500,000 one ends up paying 4.25 million in 30 years.

Travis Jones

Russian apartments are horrible in terms of size. For a while, my wife and I and our 1-year-old son were living in a 32 m2 1-room apartment in Moscow, but it was such abject misery that they ended up moving back in with her parents’. Since I’m a foreigner, I can’t borrow money (mortgage rates are 14% anyway) and they have this weird cultural phobia against renting. But anyway, we’ve managed to save some since then so we’re going to try for a 55 m2, 3-room apartment. I think that’s about half of what a family of four should shoot for. On the upside, I haven’t driven a car since I rented one to visit my grandfather in Ohio a year ago. Few in the developed world have more than 3 kids these days, with most having only two or opting not to have any. This is reflected in total fertility rates outside the African and Muslim world, which have dipped towards 2.0 – the level at which population growth stops. Even places like Mexico (2.22), Brazil (1.81) and Turkey (2.06) which once had very high fertility rates are seeing them stabilize, meaning that we shouldn’t expect the built environment of the Americas or Europe to expand, except due to migration pressures. While 120-160 m2 should be more than enough for a family of 4 or 5, the extant housing isn’t going away so there’s no use in shifting the majority of the population towards New Urbanism, as much as I wish the US had done so a few decades ago. I would say that ideally you’d have a master bedroom for the parents, a kitchen/living room combo and two additional bedrooms for a boy and a girl.

Olaf Olson

1000 square feet per person.

YouGoGlencoco

i live in ireland where housing is similar to the uk, and the reason why our houses aint that big is because land availability is tough in dense countries like the uk and ireland, and resources are a lot harder to get too in a country of smaller sizes in land mass – australia however is a highly urbanized country with plenty of resources and a relatively small population with low lying land. island countries tend to have more bumpy land. and european houses are made out of expensive brick which costs a lot as it is valuable (most american houses are made from stone or wood) and hard to import. hope this cleared things up for people

disqus_TKlQWOwlsg

Know I am late joining this discussion, but are we looking at footprint or floor space of a multiple story house?

Annie

My family of 4( me, my mom, dad, and baby sister) live in a 3,307 sqft house in the us…..